NHS Foundation Trust (FT) hospitals in England have complex internal governance arrangements. They may be considered to exhibit meta-regulatory characteristics to the extent that governors are able to promote deliberative values and steer internal governance processes towards wider regulatory goals. Yet, while recent studies of NHS FT hospital governance have explored FT governors and examined FT hospital boards to consider executive oversight, there is currently no detailed investigation of interactions between these two groups. Drawing on observational and interview data from four case-study sites, we trace interactions between the actors involved; explore their understandings of events; and consider the extent to which the proposed benefits of meta-regulation were realised in practice. Findings show that while governors provided both a conscience and contribution to internal and external governance arrangements, the meta-regulatory role was largely symbolic and limited to compliance and legitimation of executive actions. Thus while the meta-regulatory ‘architecture’ for governor involvement may be considered effective, the soft intelligence gleaned and operationalised may be obscured by ‘hard’ performance metrics which dominate resource-allocation processes and priority-setting. Governors were involved in practices that symbolised deliberative involvement but resulted in further opportunities for legitimising executive decisions.

The principal aim of law centres is to service the claims of poor and low income people in the field of social welfare law. Their successes and limitations in realising this aim constitute the major part of this paper. Levels of demand, the satisfaction of unmet legal needs and the role played by law centres in the spectrum of advice services are important factors in assessing their mission. No assessment can be complete, however, without taking into account the internal problems faced by law centres—such as, funding, caseload levels, and rationing procedures. This paper argues that the formation of a national network of law centres would help to solve many of their operational difficulties and to position them more effectively within the spectrum of legal advice services.

COVID-19 had the potential to dramatically increase public support for welfare. It was a time of apparent increased solidarity, of apparently deserving claimants, and of increasingly widespread exposure to the benefits system. However, there are also reasons to expect the opposite effect: an increase in financial strain fostering austerity and self-interest, and thermostatic responses to increasing welfare generosity. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the pandemic on attitudes towards working-age unemployment benefits in the UK using a unique combination of data sources: (i) temporally fine-grained data on attitudinal change over the course of the pandemic; and (ii) a novel nationally representative survey contrasting attitudes towards pandemic-era and pre-pandemic claimants (including analysis of free-text responses). Our results show that the pandemic prompted little change in UK welfare attitudes. However, we also find that COVID-era unemployment claimants were perceived as substantially more deserving than those claiming prior to the pandemic. This contrast suggests a strong degree of ‘COVID exceptionalism’ – with COVID claimants seen as categorically different from conventional claimants, muting the effect of the pandemic on welfare attitudes overall.

In 2017 the Scottish Government passed the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act with the commitment to significantly reduce the relative child poverty rate from the current prevailing level of around 25% to 10% by 2030/31. In response, the government introduced the Scottish Child Payment (SCP) that provides a direct transfer to households at a fixed rate per eligible child – currently £25 per week. In this paper we explore, using a micro to macro modelling approach, the effectiveness of using the SCP to achieve the Scottish child poverty targets. While we find that the ambitious child poverty targets can technically be met solely using the SCP, the necessary payment of £165 per week amounting to a total government cost of £3 billion per year, makes the political and economy-wide barriers significant. A key issue with only using the SCP is the non-linearity in the response to the payment; as the payment increases, the marginal gain in the reduction of child poverty decreases – this is particularly evident after payments of £80 per week. A ‘policy-mix’ option combining the SCP, targeted cash transfers and other policy levels (such as childcare provision) seems the most promising approach to reaching the child poverty targets.

In light of ongoing debates about income targeting in the welfare state, this article explores how the design and outcomes of income targeting policies are related to popular targeting preferences. Based on the unique combination of fine-grained opinion and policy indicators in a multilevel analysis, the results show that targeting preferences are indeed empirically related to targeting policies. However, whether these preferences are affected more by the de jure targeting design or the de facto targeting outcome seems to vary between two very different policy domains. In the case of unemployment benefits, the results suggest positive policy feedback: support for high-income targeting increases when unemployment benefits are designed to benefit those with previously higher incomes. For income taxation, by contrast, the results suggest negative policy feedback. In that case, it is not so much the de jure design but rather the de facto outcome that matters: the more taxes effectively work to the advantage of higher-income earners, the less support there is for a tax that levies the same amount on everyone, regardless of income.

This paper investigates changes over the period 2005 to 2014 in material deprivation dynamics of social risk groups in 11 European countries covering a range of welfare regimes. The period covered experienced dramatic economic change, encompassing periods of boom, the Great Recession and early recovery. Social risk groups are defined as groups which differ in the challenges that they face in converting resources into desired outcomes. The comparative element of the paper allows us to assess whether certain welfare regimes were better at protecting more vulnerable groups. Results, based on the longitudinal component of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and on analysis of deprivation dynamics between pairs of years, showed large inequality between groups in the risk of persistent deprivation – with lone parents and people with disability most at risk in all countries. Variation across welfare regimes was restricted to the contrast between the liberal and the remaining regimes. Countries belonging to the former regime (UK and Ireland) were distinctive in showing the largest social risk gap in persistent deprivation and were the only ones which experienced substantial polarisation between groups with the Great Recession.

The expansion of social pensions in Latin America was part of a larger process aimed at extending protections to informal workers and other individuals not covered by social insurance. These reforms were enacted by governments of different colours, and varied considerably with regard to the scope of the new programmes. While previous comparative studies have privileged economic factors and electoral dynamics to explain these differences, this article extends these frameworks to incorporate the interplay between contentious and institutional politics. It uses a two-step qualitative comparative analysis to investigate the long-term effect of protests on reforms extending the coverage of social pensions under different constellations of political, economic and institutional conditions in 18 Latin American countries (2000-2011). The results show that protest was present in almost all configurations of expansion, but that its effect was contingent on the ideology of governments, the levels of political competition and the strength of unions.

The allocation System whereby students pass from school to university is examined, and empirical evidence reviewed to establish the extent to which it approximates to the rationalistic model predicted by official literature on university admissions. Data from surveys in schools and universities tend to show that decisions are not the outcome of logical evaluations of objective information, but of poorly understood social processes in which institutional constraints and popular stereotypes play a major part. Implications are discussed for the secondary school curriculum, for inequalities in the selection process and for developments in admissions policies in an expanding system of higher education.

There are many calls for greater variety in the provision of higher education combined with greater transferability between courses and institutions – in short, that we should end the present hierarchy of esteem in which institutions and subjects of study are commonly held.

Is this likely to be done easily? Too little consideration has been given to the size and strength of the social forces that create educational elitism. Some idea of this size and strength may be gained by looking, as a revealing example, at some educational history. Elitism has survived in times when the factors usually thought of as decisive have been strongly adverse to it. We should not hope that its virulence is any less now. New approaches are needed, and a concerted effort to decide what these approaches should be is now urgent.

To have much hope of achieving perceived equality of esteem of diverse types of higher education, an intensive study of the causes of elitism in education, and of measures that would have some chance of reducing it, is needed. A single Royal Commission type of inquiry is unlikely to be enough. A structured set of parallel inquiries might offer more hope.

This article reports on an attempt to discover the attitudes of members of the public towards a range of personal and family problems, all of which could be seen as relevant to the work of social service departments. The data are drawn from two samples: one of current users of a social services department and the other from the general public.

Our outline findings show that although users seem more aware of the potential of social service departments than other members of the community, there is nevertheless substantial confusion and disagreement over appropriate services for different problem situations. It was equally clear that for several quite important problems many people saw voluntary or neighbourhood involvement as more relevant than intervention by a statutory agency. On the basis of these findings we discuss the following suggestions for social service departments. Firstly, education programmes are necessary to improve general knowledge about the personal social services, but structured in such a way as to avoid stimulating demand which cannot be met – we are critical of the Seebohm report's analogy of personal social services with commerce. Secondly, more attention needs to be paid to relationships between social workers and other professionals who may be intermediaries in contacts between the potential client and the agency. Thirdly, social service departments should assess their own priorities with greater sensitivity towards the community viewpoint, since we found not only a significant willingness for people to get involved in social service but a keenness to participate in policy making.

General Practitioner fundholding has been shown to enjoy a number of advantages over centralised systems of purchasing: it is more consumer sensitive, shakes up providers, shifts resources into primary care, enables expert understanding and skills to inform the purchasing function and ensures that treatment quality will have priority over cost savings. These benefits are offset by the very significant drawbacks of extra resources being needed for administration, limitations on purchaser power and the danger that the internal market principle will be undermined.

This article examines the extent to which these effects are applicable in the specific context of purchasing of community nursing services that took effect from April 1993. It is found that few of the above advantages are applicable in the community setting and that the disadvantages are particularly severe. The solution may be to combine formal centralised contracting with an element of competition at the operational level to produce a more ‘organic’ system than hitherto visualised.

The hybridisation of welfare regimes is a critical issue in social policy literature due to the lack of a uniform dependent variable and the comparative, international scope of social policy analysis, and data availability. We argue that what is presented in the global welfare regime literature as an analytical problem of classification or transitioning could also, in fact, be treated as a methodological issue. Based on this, we aim to establish a criterion for determining the membership of a welfare regime by capturing the presence of hybridisation of welfare regimes in a given country at a particular time. We present a novel methodological approach based on multistage sampling to capture the hybridisation of distinct welfare regimes and determine the most populous cluster in Pakistan. Establishing criteria for capturing and determining welfare regime membership can improve the understanding of welfare regime dynamics and factors that contribute to hybridisation. Ultimately, this knowledge can inform policy decisions and contribute to the development of more effective welfare systems for diverse populations.

This paper examines the dynamics of scandal creation and control involved in the public exposé of conditions and ill treatment at the public mental asylum of Prestwich, Lancashire in 1921. It identifies the groups and interests involved in orchestrating the public and official responses which culminated in a departmental committee of inquiry. It focuses particularly upon the conflicts and divisions within the bureaucratic institutions of the Board of Control, the Ministry of Health and the local asylum authorities, and argues that the Prestwich exposé was used in a strategy which established increased ministerial control of mental health services.

During the past four years, French economic and social policy appears to have differed both from the policies followed previously in France and from those of the other industrialized countries. The difference can be judged from the goals pursued, the means used and the results obtained. One of the goals of the socialist government elected in May 1981 was to reduce income and wealth inequalities and to improve the well-being of the poor through an active social and tax policy. This goal was also a means, since these measures — along with an expansionary fiscal policy — were supposed to precipitate economic recovery and to reduce unemployment by stimulating consumption expenditures. Actual developments, however, led to quite a radical change in French macro-economic policy. The fight against inflation and the reduction of internal and external deficits since June 1982 and the search for industrial investment and competitiveness since 1983 have reoriented both social and tax policies.

Means-tested housing allowances have played an increasingly important role in housing policies in a number of European countries in recent years. They have also provoked considerable controversy, particularly when associated with neo-liberal reforms. This has happened in West Germany, where a national scheme was introduced in 1965 as part of a reform programme involving widespread rent decontrol and a substantial reduction in ‘social housing’ expenditures. The discussion in this paper suggests that the new scheme was not very successful, either in preventing financial hardship or in providing a stimulus for house-building. Since 1965 there has been growing resistance to the idea of housing allowances as a primary instrument of housing policy, and the present government has favoured a different approach with the allowances complementing other more direct controls over the housing market.

Different interpretations of the role of housing allowances are examined in the section on France, and there is also discussion of controversial issues of a technical character. In an attempt to adapt aid closely to particular needs the French have developed extremely complex arrangements, which clearly create difficulties for administrators as well as potential recipients. There has also been conflict between an endeavour to use the allowances to improve housing standards and the aim of providing help for the poorest sections of the community.